Source: Wall Street News

“2023 is our year of efficiency,” Zuckerberg expressed his right at the beginning of the call$Meta Platforms (META.US)$Satisfied with last year's results.

Last year, we not only achieved our efficiency goals, but also resumed strong revenue growth, and our app had high user exposure;

Many exciting new products have been released, such as Threads, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and mixed reality (features) on Quest 3;

Of course, we've built world-class AI models that will be the foundation for many of our future products.

As Zuckerberg said, with the support of Chinese advertising funders, Meta produced the strongest financial report in the company's history last year. The fourth quarter results and first-quarter guidance both surpassed Wall Street expectations. It also announced an increase of 50 billion US dollars in stock repurchases and the first dividend in history.

Zuckerberg said that Meta's primary goal now is to “build the most popular and advanced AI products and services,” so Meta needs to give its models “reasoning, planning, coding, memory, and many other cognitive abilities.”

The biggest keyword in 2024: AI

AI assistants are one of the key topics of Meta 2024.

Zuckerberg said that this new generation of AI will generate a large number of good assistants. This will be one of the main values of this generation of AI. It is expected that Meta AI Assistant will be promoted to more Meta apps later in 2024.

Also, according to Chief Financial Officer Susan Li, in 2024, Meta's focus will be to launch Llama 3, expand the utility of Meta's AI Assistant, and advance the AI Studio roadmap to “make it easier for anyone to create AI characters.”

Zuckerberg reiterated that Meta's long-term strategic goal is to build an open source general AI model. The company is currently training Llama 3. By the end of this year, Meta will have about 350,000 Nvidia H100 units, and if other GPUs are included, it will have about 600,000 H100 equivalent computing power.

As a key strategy, Meta will use unique data and content from its social platforms to train AI models.

There are hundreds of billions of publicly shared images and tens of billions of public videos on Facebook and Instagram, which we estimate is more than a typical crawler data set. People also share tons of public text posts and comments on our service.

Keep betting on the metaverse

In addition to AI, Meta's other long-term vision remains the metaverse.

Zuckerberg said:

We've invested heavily in AI and virtual universes for a long time, and we'll continue to do so. I've been getting a lot of questions about AI these days, and the field is growing very fast.

But I still expect the next generation of AR, VR, and MR computing platforms to deliver immersive experiences that will be the foundation for future social experiences and almost every other category of experiences.

Meta previously stated that it will continue to invest heavily in the metaverse over the next ten years, but is now betting heavily on AI. Does this mean that this timeline has changed? Or can this goal be achieved ahead of schedule?

Zuckerberg did not directly answer this question; he said:

I do think AI will make all of our products and services better, so it's hard to know exactly what the results will be. But the work of Reality Labs (Reality Labs), specifically, is in many fields.

Now it seems like AI glasses are likely to be a killer product, and the immersive holographic experience will come later — maybe in the same time frame we discussed earlier, but the impact may be as significant as we anticipated. But until then, there's probably a big market here. So I think we'll fix this in the next few years.

Chinese advertising financiers help Meta's financial recovery

Meta credits part of its financial recovery over the past year to Chinese advertising financiers.

In an earnings conference call, Li said that in 2023, revenue from Chinese advertisers accounted for 10% of Meta's total revenue, contributing 5 percentage points to the increase in global total revenue.

Monthly active user data will not be published in the future

According to Meta, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp have reached 4 billion monthly active users.

Zuckerberg said that the short video platform “Reels” on Instagram and Facebook is now being re-shared 3.5 billion times a day, and short video ads are now contributing net revenue to these two apps.

He said that continuing to improve these videos, the ads offered here, and the algorithms that personalize users will continue to be “the focus.”

Li announced during a conference call that Meta will no longer report the number of daily and monthly users of its flagship social app Facebook in earnings reports.

Beginning this quarter, the company will instead report year-on-year changes in ad impressions and average ad prices across regions, while continuing to report the number of daily active users for its app line.

First-quarter guidance exceeded expectations, but full-year guidance was not provided

Meta expects revenue of US$34.5 billion to US$37 billion for the first quarter, higher than analysts' expectations of US$33.64 billion. Overall expenditure is expected to remain unchanged at US$94-99 billion in 2024, and analysts' expectations of US$96.45 billion.

Meta didn't share guidance for the full year, though. When asked by analysts, Li said:

Our revenue throughout the year will be affected by many factors, including macro conditions, which will certainly be more difficult to predict over time.

Other highlights: dividends, in-app shopping features, app stores

Meta will pay out its first dividend in the company's history, with a dividend of 50 cents per share, and also announced an additional $50 billion in share repurchases.

Li said that dividends provide the company with a more balanced return on capital plan and add some flexibility, but “it will not change the way we determine the return of total capital, and it is expected that share buybacks will continue to be our primary method of returning capital to shareholders.”

When asked about the store advertising business, Meta said it will continue to use AI to improve the effectiveness of store advertisements.

Li said that Meta is cooperating with Amazon to launch a “Buy with Prime” one-click purchase service to improve users' shopping experience on Facebook and Instagram platforms.

Some analysts asked Zuckerberg, what impact will Apple's opening of the App Store in the EU have on Meta's future development of the App Store?

Zuckerberg believes there will be no impact. The conditions implemented by Apple are too strict and contrary to the original intention of EU regulations, so he believes that app developers are unlikely to abandon the Apple App Store to find an alternative.

editor/tolk